Answers for Elders Episode: Having a Healthy Brain As We Age
Lori Hutson joins Suzanne to talk about brain health, an aspect of intellectual wellness, one of the 8 foundational principles of wellness featured this month as part of the Vitality Revolution podcast series sponsored by Humana.
Lori says, “One of the main things would be what’s normal and what’s not normal as far as our state of mind, our memory, things like that. As we do get older, there are some … small declines in memory, a slower processing speed. That’s pretty typical… reaction time, decrease speed in learning – it might take us a little longer to learn things. I talked about the difficulty of doing more than one task at a time, and difficulty ignoring distractions. Abnormal things would be being unable to remember recent events, forgetting how to use common objects — again, we’re looking at dementia — getting lost in familiar locations, being unable to follow directions. Another is neglecting safety, hygiene, and nutrition, and decline in the ability to socialize.”
Lori adds, “I know that it’s important to utilize your brain in different ways, and to stretch the “muscles” of your brain to keep it active. Another thing is our diet and hydration. Hydration is a big one that I find with a lot of my clients is affecting their brain health. They’re not hydrating – they’re worried about incontinence issues. If they feel like I’m gonna have to get up and go to the bathroom five times during the night, they don’t want to drink water. That causes UTIs, which actually can affect dementia and escalate it. Our diet can be a factor as well. So if you’re eating TV dinners every night, that affect the brain health. And you think about the Mediterranean diet, or something like that, where they’re eating a lot of oils and fats, our brain is fat. So if we’re not getting those healthy fats, then that can really affect our brain health.”
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Originally published August 31, 2023
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